The 1989 Pink Cadillac (ABC Sunday at...
The 1989 Pink Cadillac (ABC Sunday at 8:30 p.m.) is the latest (1989) in a long line of Clint Eastwood Saturday night action specials, full of salty violence and cool humor. The movie was conceived for no other reason than to give him something to drive; as long as he’s at top speed it’s a fairly amusing ride.
In its unabashed, deliberate squareness, the 1984 Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (ABC Monday at 9 p.m.) comes out strongly for the old-fashioned virtues of loyalty, bravery and sacrifice. While coming up with another splendid adventure, writer-producer Harve Bennett ingeniously resurrects Spock, who sacrificed himself at the end of “Star Trek II.”
The Man with One Red Shoe (KTTV Tuesday at 8 p.m.) is a labored 1985 remake of France’s giddy “The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe” in which Tom Hanks plays a young man wrongly targeted by the CIA. Luckily, even so near the beginning of his career Hanks has a loopy comic charm.
The 1984 Starman (KTTV Wednesday at 8 p.m.) comes as a beguiling surprise from gore master John Carpenter. It’s a gentle, hard-to-resist, deeply poignant romantic fable about a woman (Karen Allen) on the lam with an endangered alien (Jeff Bridges, in a high-watermark performance).
The title characters of Tom Stoppard’s 1990 film of his play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (KCET Wednesday at 9 p.m.) are hazily familiar as the treacherous school fellows of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.” The blithe Rosencrantz (Gary Oldman) and the icily glum Guildenstern (Tim Roth) have been mysteriously summoned to Elsinore. The unfolding of the familiar tragedy from a fresh perspective has struck some viewers as brilliantly literate, but be prepared to find it a little tedious.
The 1986 Extremities (KCOP Friday at 8 p.m.) is a serious, nonexploitive, carefully done adaptation of William Mastrosimone’s 1982 off-Broadway hit. It is the story of a woman (Farrah Fawcett), twice the victim of a would-be rapist, who turns the tables on her attacker--powerfully; however, it’s not clear what we’re supposed to learn from this fierce dramatic exercise that we don’t already know.
The 1989 hit Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (CBS Saturday at 8 p.m.), in which shrunken suburbanites are thrust into the ominous jungle of their Gargantuan back yard, is a cautionary comedy about human beings deformed by science--and an overly loud fable about suburban conformity.
Laurence Olivier’s 1945 classic Henry V airs on KCET Saturday at 9 p.m.
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